Today's global economy demands effective worldwide communication. For example, manufacturers often have suppliers located across the country and around the world. Timely and effective communication between the manufacturer and supplier can be critical to business success. In other cases, companies often assign business projects to work groups with members physically located around the world. In some situations, the work group members can belong to different organizations and/or companies. As with manufacturers and suppliers, timely and effective communication can be critical to the success of the work group.
Face-to-face meetings have been the traditional method of communicating, but, with the organizations becoming increasing geographically dispersed, these meetings often require travel on the part of attendees and, thus, are becoming increasingly time and cost prohibitive. With proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, and in particular, the maturing of the World Wide Web (“web”), these meetings are increasingly taking place virtually over computer networks through the use of electronic communication technologies, such as web meeting/conferencing and application sharing.
Application sharing technologies enable a sharing user, also referred to as a “presenter,” to share an application with various viewing users, also referred to as “attendees” or “participants.” The display produced by the application that is executing on the presenter's computer, and which is being shared, is made available via a connection, typically through a computer network, to the attendees' computers.
For example, when application sharing, the presenter of the application sharing session sends images of an area on the presenter's computer screen—i.e., the desktop—to all the other attendees of the meeting. The presenter may be able to designate what is to be shared with the attendees by, for example, electing to share the contents displayed on the entire screen, the contents displayed within a “sharing frame,” which is a portion of the screen designated by the presenter using a pointing device such as a mouse, or the contents displayed by an application, typically in an application window. The attendees of the meeting see the shared images reconstructed on their own computers, and are able to see exactly what the presenter is seeing.
Even though electronic communication technologies provide many benefits, such as increased efficiency, there are, however, drawbacks with these technologies for application or image sharing. One drawback occurs when the presenter's computer and the attendees' computers are running at different screen resolutions, specifically when the presenter's computer is running at a higher screen resolution than an attendee's computer. In order to give the attendee full access to the entire higher resolution image on the attendee's lower resolution screen, the image is displayed using scroll bars on the attendee's computer. However, scroll bars may be difficult to use during a collaboration session, and the attendee will not be able to see the entire image at one time. Moreover, if the presenter performs an action, such as making an edit in a shared document, in the section of the image that is displayed on the presenter's computer screen but not displayed on the attendee's computer screen because of the lower resolution, the attendee will not be visually aware of the action taken by the presenter. Further, by the time the attendee manages to use the scroll bars to display the portion of the image in which the presenter performed the action, the presenter may have long completed the action.
Alternatively, the attendee's computer can scale the received higher resolution image to match the lower screen resolution running on the attendee's computer. For example, if the attendee's computer is currently running at 800×600 pixel screen resolution and the presenters computer is running at 1600×1200 pixel screen resolution, the attendee's computer can scale the received 1600×1200 pixel image down to an 800×600 pixel image to display the entire image without using scroll bars. A problem with scaling down the resolution of the image is the loss of detail. Depending on the difference in resolutions, a very large amount of detail may be lost. For example, the loss of detail may render a shared document illegible.
It would be desirable to have a technique that allows the presenter of an application or image sharing session to consider the resolutions of the attendees' computer screens in order to enhance the attendees viewing experience.